Did the Soviets Use Henry Ford’s Trucks As Homicidal Mobile Gas Chambers?

By Michael Walsh. Ideologues often find that life’s practicalities get in the way of their more Utopian inclinations. Henry Ford, the great American industrialist and pioneer of the motoring class, must have been a very enigmatic man.

This genial Irish-American made the world sit up when he expressed his forthright views on the omnipotence of the International Jew. These exposés appeared in the Dearborn Independent and were later published in book format.

Henry Ford had much in common with Julius Streicher. The German Reich’s nemesis of German Jewry was also of humble rustic background and likewise a close associate of Reich President-Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

There the two men parted company for Henry Ford’s industrial ambitions made him an international player. A household name in the United States, the innovator’s automotive manufacturing plants simultaneously put the Soviet Union’s harvested prisoners on the road to the notorious Gulag slave camps.

Ford’s contribution to Tsar Nicholas’s usurpers no doubt inspired the Fuhrer to mock the blindly stumbling Bolsheviks. Speaking at the Second Labour Congress in Berlin, May 16, 1934, the Fuhrer was at his sardonic best:

“Soviet Russia seems like a man wandering through a bog on the arm of a stronger man? This Soviet Russia toils perpetually along on the arm of the capitalist States. She took from them her workers, her engineers, her machines: she drew everything from the capitalists’ states but went on her way and talked the whole time about Marxist Communism.

“Soviet Russia should be stood on her own feet that would be quite possible for a country like Russia, and told, ‘Now create your Paradise yourself’. The results would be interesting. At present, as Communists, they were living only on the non-communist institutions of the world.”

The overview was the German leader’s reference to America’s industrial muscle being used in to kick-start the failed Bolshevik economy. In setting up huge vehicle making plants in the Soviet Union Henry Ford was hardly on his own. Getting in on the kill was General Electric, International Harvester Tractors, and Caterpillar et al. These corporations were financed by Wall Street’s banking houses. Yet, Henry Ford was later recognized and honored by Adolf Hitler for his having published The International Jew.

Henry Ford’s four-volume work, The International Jew, found equal renown in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Oddly, it could be said that the descriptive terminology used by Henry Ford when penning The International Jew might at times have made the Fuhrer cringe.

As I said in my book Trotsky’s White Negroes:

“There is solid evidence that Ford manufactured vans used by the Soviet NKVD were adapted for the lethal gassing of prisoners. Twenty years later this inhumane method of prisoner disposal was erroneously blamed on Hitler’s Germany.

“In 1936, Isay Davidovich Berg, Jewish head of the Administrative and Economic Department of the NKVD of Moscow Oblast, modified the Ford-built vans. These vehicles were the means of suffocating prisoners in batches with engine fumes while en route to the mass graves at Butovo where prisoners were subsequently buried.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

“The gas wagon (dushegubka) was invented and used by the Soviet secret police NKVD in the late 1930s during the Great Purge. The vehicle had an air-tight compartment for victims, into which exhaust fumes were transmitted while the engine was running. The victims were gassed with carbon monoxide, resulting in death by monoxide poisoning and suffocation.

“Isay Berg’s method was to strip the victims naked, tether them, plug their mouths and throw them into a closed truck [See top right and bottom images below]. Each van was disguised from the outside as a bread van. During transportation exhaust gases were piped into the body of the van. When delivered to the farthest (execution) ditch those arrested were already dead.”

It was Berg’s suggestion that these deadly vehicles were of the widely used GAZ-AA truck chassis (licensed American model Ford AA truck 1929).

In October 1931 a Model AA was the first vehicle produced at Ford’s own new Dagenham plant in England. Ford licensed the manufacture of the Model A and AA to a variety of nations, notably the Soviet Union. More than 985,000 GAZ AAs were built in USSR from 1932 to 1950.